Free Republic

It was one of the most bizarre episodes of the Second World War. When Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess, landed by parachute in 1941 near the estate of the Duke of Hamilton in Lanarkshire, it raised the question of whether British intelligence or members of the aristocracy were trying to broker a secret peace deal with the Nazis. But recently declassified MI5 files shed more light on Hess’s mysterious flight to Scotland, and finally prove the conspiracy theories to be unfounded, according to the duke’s son, Lord James Douglas-Hamilton, the Lothians MSP. The Conservative peer said yesterday that the new MI5...

Since midsummer, the Senate Intelligence Committee has been attempting to solve the biggest mystery of the Iraq war: the disparity between the Bush Administration’s prewar assessment of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and what has actually been discovered. The committee is concentrating on the last ten years’ worth of reports by the C.I.A. Preliminary findings, one intelligence official told me, are disquieting. “The intelligence community made all kinds of errors and handled things sloppily,” he said. The problems range from a lack of quality control to different agencies’ reporting contradictory assessments at the same time. One finding, the official went...